


The End of the Journey

by astolat



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, F/M, First Time, Halamshiral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 18:12:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2742173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Come with me," she said afterwards, light from all the palace lamps brilliant in her eyes and her cheeks flushed with victory and dancing, still holding his hand, and Solas could not refuse her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End of the Journey

**Author's Note:**

> This has mild spoilers for the Orlesian court quest and major spoilers for the end of the game and the Solas/Lavellan romance! [Originally posted to the DA kink meme](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/10859.html?thread=46029675#t46029675).

"Come with me," she said afterwards, light from all the palace lamps brilliant in her eyes and her cheeks flushed with victory and dancing, still holding his hand, and Solas could not refuse her. He let her laughing draw him down a trellis wall into the quiet dark of the closed garden below, the soft distant gurgle of a fountain laughing with her -- laughing at him, though she knew it not: at his folly.

But she was so beautiful, his Inquisitor: even the slave-markings could not diminish her grace or her pride. She had come in among these foolish quicklings, whispering mockery behind their masks, and she had conquered: she had laid her hand upon the reins of an empire, and pulled, and turned its course. She had danced unerring through the steps of courtly intrigue as easily as she flung her spells across the battlefield -- and then she turned one more time, towards him, moonlight making her hair silver.

He caught his breath. For a moment the garden faded, overwritten by a place more worthy, and she stood beneath the boughs in Arlathan, crowned in stars, her long smooth arms bare to the shoulder and her  _miselethlin_  falling in a grey-green shimmer to the earth around her bare feet. The trees sang softly around her, and he could have knelt to her: he could have laid an offering of white flowers gathered by his own hand at her feet, though he had never bowed his head before, not even to Andruil with her golden arrows pointed at his heart. 

But Lavellan -- his  _lha'vhenan_ , his clear heart, who did not even know her own true name -- did not make him kneel. She knew nothing of her rights, nor of the cruelty behind the vallaslin that would have stripped them, and made her lawful prey. She held out her hands to him, calling softly, "Solas," and the vision slipped away into the Fade. They stood in a dark too-mortal garden, humid and full of crushed grass, and he let her come in so close he caught the faint smell of lightning in the air about her, still crackling-charged. His hands prickled where he caught her shoulders and brought her to him, brought her mouth to his, knowing he put his foot into a trap even as he seized upon the bait. 

But oh, he was  _hungry_  -- so very starved, and when she sighed in satisfaction against him and then put her leg between his and twisted him down to the ground, he fell, willing. The silken touch of her magic caught him, lowered him, and she was above him, her eyes alight and her mouth trembling with smiles. "I should have tumbled you in the courtyard long before now," she said. 

"Yes," he said, his breath tight in his throat as though he'd been running a long way, "yes, you should," and then she was in his arms. 

She kissed him with so much triumph and delight, with joy, asking nothing of him but that same joy shared. Simple, straightforward, and yet he had watched her here all this night: had seen her smile and lower her eyes and lie with a tilt of her head, a deceptively fragile gesture of her hand. Not a week ago he had been walking the halls of Skyhold late at night, and heard her voice from behind a door saying, "All right, I understand," then Josephine's anxious voice, hesitant, "This point is very important, Inquisitor. Perhaps if we reviewed it a little longer — " only to be told firmly, "Let's move on." 

Worried, he’d tried hinting to her a little himself. “Not you, too,” she’d said, half-amused, and he’d withdrawn: it was too dangerous to be alone with her and her bright eyes speaking of all the other, better things they might have been doing.

But he had gone on doubting. He had still thought of her as one of the Dalish: hostile and closed-off, wary and uninterested in anything of shemlen life, crude herdsmen with no greater ambition than survival and the preservation of the last, least scraps of Elvhenan, half-forgotten lore and lies. He had thought her the best of them, and smiled down at her with tenderness, and let himself take sweet kisses from her mouth in the Fade as he might have dallied with a shepherd girl in a field, a thousand ages before.

But she had come here, to the heart of the quicklings’ kingdom, and played their Game as though born to it, and he could not dismiss her ever again, even fondly. Her simplicity was not inherent but chosen; what she lacked was not subtlety, but fear and cruelty. She kissed him again, unafraid, and he felt suddenly with a strange and terrible force that if all of Elvhenan lay open to her, if  _he_  lay open to her, she would look on them not only with wonder but with judgement. That she might walk out of the gates of Arlathan risen, back into the cool green woods of her people — singing, as she sang sometimes while they trudged the forest lanes of Ferelden, a song that slaves had once sung in the fields at twilight with the words all changed.

“How can you be, my bright one?” he murmured in the true tongue, lost and five thousand years gone. “Here, past all memory of beauty and of glory,” and he kissed her before she could ask what he had said, burying his hands in her short and practical hair, the tousled cloud of it deliciously illicit around his fingers. It ought to have been long, in braids woven with silk and undying flowers, unbound only on their wedding-night — 

He shuddered, for as the thought came to him the faint tracework shadow of a bower crept into view around and above her, the branches woven together and the moon overhead shining latticework upon them, and he feared it was true sight. He had never offered his hand, had never wished to do so in all his long wild years, even after he had dreamed the longest dream and come out alive through the Fade with the power Corypheus now only grotesquely and blindly scrabbled after. He might even have named himself head of his own house and claimed a bride of the  _Selastaveli_ ; who would have dared refuse him, even if he flouted all convention and order? The dream-woken were not governed by the laws of ordinary elvhen. 

But some laws held even them. He could pretend she was a slave, and her sweetness something he might claim untouched. His spirit knew otherwise. If he lay with her, here, now —

"Stop thinking!" She bit him on the chin, and  _if_  was as laughable as trying to beat away the tide with a broom. He rolled them over, full of wild urgency -- to have it done, come what would. He jerked loose his belt, and she flung away the ridiculous hat, pulling her own jacket open, and her breasts were pale and bare in the moonlight, small and perfect, and he put his mouth to one hard-pebbled nipple and felt her gasp beneath him. She squirmed and sent tendrils of magic unlacing his breeches, her hands flexing upon his shoulders, and he drew himself up and came upon her. He rubbed deliberately between her legs, this last moment of anticipation: oh, she was wet, and he groaned as her eyes went heavy and soft. 

She put her legs around him and drew him in. He slid deep — deep, panting, held tense. He could tell she had given this to some other man, in some other time and world. By the law that man was his to kill, now, if he could. He _wanted_  to, eagerly, full of the terrible bright thought of that blood crimson on his hands and spattered upon snow at his feet. He wanted to go run among the clans howling his true name and claiming all their worst fears of him, to frighten off all the unworthy and to bring any real rivals to face him and die. Oh, how he had sneered at Elgar'nan's rages and Andruil's mad blood-baths. He could have laughed — at them; at himself, then and now. He could have wept. 

"Ma sa'lath," she murmured, as though she had seen his thoughts:  _my one love_ , like a cool balm upon his spirit. He buried his face against the hollow of her neck and shoulder, breathing her in. Her hands clasped his head, her fingers sliding over the bare curve of his skull, his penitence and his doom. Would she help him unmake this world, to restore the one he had destroyed? He could not risk asking. He needed to be there when Corypheus was forced to turn the orb against her, for that last fragile chance of opening the doors he had once closed tight. Would she forgive him, after? He did not need to ask if she would survive. He had the scent of her spirit now. If she died in that wild unbinding, he would give chase and find her in the Fade. He would lead her along the paths of the long dreams, and he would weave her new-made mortal flesh, from air and earth, from fire and from ice. She had already walked in the Fade in body; it would not be hard. If she would follow him. If she did not turn from him and walk away, down the one road that led between the city and the abyss, from where no traveler ever returned. 

"My people have a saying," she said, her voice at once teasing and gentle. 

"Have they?" he managed. 

"Yes," she said. "Drink the day's measure of grief and joy, and put aside what's left for tomorrow." 

And then she moved beneath him, deliberately, a breathtaking sinuous twist of her hips. Heat washed through him. "How wise," he said, strangled. "It seems I have not done the Dalish justice. In more than one respect." 

"Start making up for it any time you like," she said, and laughed, and he laughed with her beneath the stars and moon, and bent to the sweet work of the moment. She was his, and he was hers, and perhaps he was unwise, but he was not the least of the People. He had bent the world to his will before; he would bend it again. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] The End of the Journey](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11668512) by [BabelGhoti (TheHandmadeTale)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHandmadeTale/pseuds/BabelGhoti)




End file.
